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posted by
cmn32480
on Monday October 31 2016, @06:16PM
from the explosions-killing-everybody-isn't-a-choice dept.
from the explosions-killing-everybody-isn't-a-choice dept.
Researchers at MIT have put together a pictorial survey http://moralmachine.mit.edu/ -- if the self-driving car loses its brakes, should it go straight or turn? Various scenarios are presented with either occupants or pedestrians dying, and there are a variety of peds in the road from strollers to thieves, even pets.
This AC found that I quickly began to develop my own simplistic criteria and the decisions got easier the further I went in the survey.
While the survey is very much idealized, it may have just enough complexity to give some useful results?
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If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
-- Tom Robbins
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 31 2016, @07:39PM
Turns out that at least one person in vicinity of my meatspace avatar started having second thoughts about being an organ donor after she was told the corpses are artificially kept alive long enough so a donor could be found.
Lack of information or lack of sanity are two possible causes which might cause people to act irrationally. No matter how many backdoors are in your Apple® Iphone™, people still buy them because they're a fad.
Same with those cars.
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Monday October 31 2016, @08:09PM
To be fair, if you're eligible for organ donation you aren't going to mind being supported while a recipient is found. The criteria for brain death are incredibly strict.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday November 01 2016, @02:22AM
Many posting here may pre-qualify.
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 01 2016, @10:40AM
The criteria for brain death are incredibly strict.
We believed the same before we found out about locked-in syndrome, even though we already had been having EEG.
Problem with end-of-conscious-life conditions are that we don't get no witnesses to tell us what really happens.
For all we don't know, the patches of consciousness could linger quite a long time even into the decay phase, and serenity and deliverance from suffering the death allegedly brings could be nothing but an illusion, wishful thinking and a myth. Biology owes us no comfort, survival gains nothing from easing our demise for us.
We should not get to reliant on organ donations for healing, it is essentially hoping for others' misery.
Further down the road it may impede our research in neurology, in trauma prevention and treatment. It is a moral imperative to find other ways, to synthesize or recreate spare organs.